Starliner leaving astronauts stranded after first not making it to the space station.
737 MAX crashing and killing people due to slapped-together flight control integration.
737 MAX having windows blow out due to sheer manufacturing incompetence.
KC-46 deliveries being rejected due to literal tools being found in fuel tanks.
Boeing HAD an over 100 year history of delivering. You can build a thousand bridges. No one's calling you a bridgebuilder after you shag just one sheep.
My experience was less good. Starlink suffered from intermittent outages, and enough bitrate jitter to make video calling a distraction. Latency was good but still higher than advertised, and the average download speed felt noticeably slower than wired broadband. It wasn't uncommon to see 50% dropped packets while playing a game or watching live content, which is more than I saw with Hughesnet.
It's preferable to 3G or being stranded in the woods, but there are definitely points where I wondered if a 4G LTE hotspot would have been faster for home internet.
Is satellite internet advertised as being more capable than a 4G LTE hotspot?
From my understanding, physics would not allow that (for a decent, not oversubscribed 4G LTE mobile connection and backhaul). But those parameters exist for satellite internet, too.
I mean anecdotes aren't great for sweeping generalizations. When I'm taking vacation at my sister's ranch teams calls work just fine with my customers, so ones mileage may vary.
It's about growth potential. Boeing has all the excitement of a utility company, just with bigger publicity problems. SpaceX has the potential to forge whole new industries. If you're bullish on space tourism or asteroid mining, SpaceX is the best bet on the table right now.
> China's building two, so that advantage will be fleeting
Monopoly may be fleeting. Advantage, no.
Again, we're looking at a decade plus of SpaceX having a decided advantage in putting mass in orbit. That could mean more capability, more capacity, faster deployment of new technology or even more margin (since you can go cheap on station keeping).
Ah yes. One of them got $2.6B for six flights. The other one got $4.2B for six flights.
One of them flew six flights successfully, got contract extended further to 14 flights for a total of 4.93 billion. They also flew other paying customers seven times.
In that time, the second one flew once with astronauts, and had so many problems that they ended up coming home on the first guy's spacecraft.
